In an era where wannabe Martians like Elon Musk want to “die on Mars” and earthlings optimistically contemplate one day living on a Martian colony, the goofily antiquated take on space travel in 1951’s Flight to Mars—newly reissued on Blu-ray—and its stone-faced mid-century skepticism about life on other planets offers a sobering, if a cheesy, reminder that travel to Mars might just be a big waste of rocket fuel. But to its credit, this low-budget affair actually does envision civilians traveling to space long before the concept of astronaut existed (as we’ve just seen with the latest SpaceX flight) and nearly ten years before the first manned space flight.
On this particular mission, you have a pessimistic professor, a prominent female scientist, a tabloid journalist, among others on board—no spacesuits necessary, just your normal Sunday-go-to-meeting attire, since there seem to be no problems with gravity in this fictional imagining of space travel. Although the dangers of the mission are apparent to everyone, none of the travelers seem to care whether they ever get back to Earth and indulge in a lot of long-winded philosophical musings about what they’ll find when they get to their destination.
After navigating through a not-so-scary asteroid field, the rocket ship’s landing gear experiences a technical failure and the craft safely crash lands on a Martian snow-covered mountain. Not long after the crew escapes the crashed ship, they meet a gaggle of curious Martians who, conveniently, just happen to speak most Earthly languages including perfectly articulated English, which they claim to have picked up from intercepting radio transmissions. The Martians are highly intelligent beings with sophisticated technology: they have a “food laboratory” where scrumptious meals are cooked in seconds and served in what we would now recognize as a Best Western-style budget hotel buffet.
But, in the end, they are just as base and scheming as the worst of us on Earth. For as we find out, Mars is a “dying planet” and the “president” of Mars (who expresses interest in the Earth’s “atomic power”) cooks up a plan to imprison the space travelers, repair the rocket ship, and fly his Martian community to safety on Earth(!) This, of course, eventually leads to a big punch-up at the end to see who gets priority seating on the Earthbound spaceflight.
Probably the most intriguing thing about this cheeseball B-movie classic is its imagining of Martian fashion: the male Martians are dressed in superhero-style capes with a pre-David Bowie lightning bolt insignia emblazoned on the front of their Flash Gordon-like jumpsuits. While the females are all leggy runway model types whose shiny short-shorts must have raised a few hackles in the day: this was after all at least a decade before the advent of the miniskirt. Although fun for a few retro laughs, Flight to Mars isn’t quite bad enough to qualify for an Ed Wood-style so-bad-its-good reputational overhaul.